06/10/2010

Raleigh Shopper Mods

Karl, who blogs at Do the Right Thing, informed us of a couple of mods he performed on his wife's bike to make it more wife friendly. It seems his wife's bike suffers from a similar issue as my Globe - a poorly designed brake cable basically funnels water into the brake cable housing. His wife also wanted to be able to carry stuff in a stylish basket. Karl completed the "honey do" list in style. All pictures are credited to Karl and the full story can be found on his blog. Karl kicks it off by stating:

Two mods to a '70s Raleigh Shopper - re-routing the rear brake cable to
improve weather resistance, and fitting a front basket. The problem here is that the cable’s sheath points upwards. When you
ride in the rain, water gets inside this, forming a pool at the lowest
point. Rusting, fraying cables follow just as surely as night follows
day - no matter how often you grease the damned things.

This is the before picture . . .

And the after . . .

Next up, the basket . . .

The first thing to do was put a support under where the basket would go.
I don’t think Wife’ll be carrying much in the way of gold ingots, lead
stripped from church roofs, or osmium bricks, but I still didn’t like
the idea of the basket just hanging there. Fortunately, I had some old
shelf brackets around. A few minutes with a hacksaw, a little filing
& touching up of the sawn edges, and we’d got this in place:

And it's pretty easy to see what's going on here with some zip ties and a dowel.